In the entertainment arts (movies, television, theatrical plays) authors of documents often face a dilemma when turning in their written work: they need to fit their documents into a prescribed length. For example, the typical screenplay for a motion picture is expected to be approximately 120 pages, roughly one page per minute of screen time. Turning in a screenplay that is longer, even by a few pages, can cause a screenplay to be rejected or worse—not even read. Conversely, scripts that are below 80 pages are generally considered too short to be accepted as a theatrical feature.
For television scripts, each section of a script often has to be a prescribed length due to commercial breaks, as well as fitting into the maximum airtime allocated for a show. This means there are multiple sections within a single document where adhering to specific page goals is mandatory.
The inverse of the problem also exists: writers often need to enhance material by adding additional text to exiting material, but don't wish to do so at the expense of increasing total page length.
However, most screenwriters understand that the long held tradition of one page equaling one minute of screen time is highly variable. The actual running time is strongly linked to both the style of the writer and the content of what is being written. So writers have evolved methods of adjusting their scripts—making long scripts appear shorter and short scripts appear longer.
Numerous techniques have existed since the early days of writing, mostly involving outright deceitful manipulation of a document: changing the final page number, doubling page numbers, printing onto lighter 16 pound paper instead of the traditional 20 pound duplication bond. With the advent of computerized word processing in the early 1980's, writers developed more sophisticated techniques that were less detectable: they were able to change the point size of a font, shave points off the line height, and adjust the formatting of margins. Collectively these techniques are known as “cheating the script.”
However, as the general population became more familiar with computerized word processing, it became simple for the average reader to recognize that a screenplay, teleplay or stage play did not fit the rigors of the prescribed format. Thus, it became necessary to solve this problem with a different approach.
The technique for honestly adjusting page count is simply to add to or remove from the existing material. For example, a common approach to decreasing page count is to look though the document to find paragraphs that have a short last line, in the hope that these paragraphs will be the easiest to edit and thus a line may be saved. Save enough lines and a few pages might be saved.
Prior art has focused on the manipulation of formatting, versus the editing of content. “Dynamic Page Reduction” (Horton 5,835,920) describes “a method for reducing a page to accommodate “orphan” or “dangling” lines which continue on a subsequent page.” The spatial reduction methods described in the patent deal with spacing and formatting, using the automatic reduction of point size and line height as methods to fit the text of a telephone billing statement onto fewer pages.
Most general word processors have the capability of globally changing document styles. By using such features to change margins, line height, font size, and global paper size, users have been able to manipulate document length. Specialized word processors, such as the software tool, Movie Magic Screenwriter (1995), contain features for further automating page reduction by allowing global reduction of line heights of blank lines. However, all these methods of manipulating formatting parameters, known as “cheating”, have become detectable and are no longer acceptable.
However, there is a complication that makes this approach haphazard. There are complex rules that affect the pagination of technical documents such as entertainment scripts, and these rules limit the number of available locations where page breaks may occur. For example, the deletion of hundreds of lines in a long 125 page document might have no effect on page count. However, in the same document, a single word might be shortened on, for example, page 11, leading to a significant (1-3 page) downstream decrease in page count by the time page 125 is reached. We refer to this as the “chaos of pagination.”
Because of this problem, writers often spend a great deal of time manually making changes to see if the changes achieve the desired result.